UCF’s Karen L. Smith Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning, a participant in the UCF Core Commitments projects, is the center for faculty development activities at UCF. With support from AAC&U, we have created faculty development tracks and course innovation projects to incorporate Core Commitments content into targeted UCF courses in multiple disciplines.
Our first “Core Commitments” track during the 2007 Summer Faculty Development Conference at UCF was held from April 30-May 3, 2007 at the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning (FCTL). Faculty participants from the UCF Departments of Philosophy, Political Science, Health Professions, and Engineering created Core Commitments course content for specific courses in these disciplines or departments.
During the Winter 2007 FCTL Faculty Development Conference, the Core Commitments grant project funded several faculty members who are interested in adding Core Commitments content for their courses. In addition, a spring 2008 Course Innovation Project involved creating a core of information for the development of content for faculty by faculty on “What Every Faculty Member Should Know About Academic Ethics.” This project continued throughout the Summer 2008 Faculty Development Conference (from April 29-May 2, 2008). Please see http://nstanlick.googlepages.com/academicintegrityatucf for information about the Summer and Winter 2007 Faculty Development Conferences, the spring 2008 Course Innovation Project, and the Summer 2008 Faculty Development Conferences.
3 comments
Comments feed for this article
October 26, 2007 at 3:28 am
ucfcorecommitments
Seven UCF Faculty members, including those from Philosophy, Political Science, Education, English, and Religious Studies, will participate in the Fall/Winter 2007 UCF Faculty Development Conference to be held in December. Their project is jointly and individually created with attention to the UCF Common Theme on Global Climate Change and the relationship of this world-wide issue to personal and social responsibility. After the Faculty Development Conference at the Karen L. Smith Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning, more information about course innovations and developments to combine Core Commitments and the UCF Common Theme will be available here.
The general statement of their joint and individual project is:
Climate change is a global change with regional and differentiated impacts that come from anthropogenic hydrocarbon forcing (e.g., CO2 emmissions) which have led to an international discussion on “common but differentiated responsibilities” to address climate change. As a part of the UCF Core Committments project, projects in this proposal will integrate climate change (consonant with the UCF GEP theme) into a specific course in order to generate discourse on climate change ethics and concerns for contributing to a larger community
In addition, participating faculty members will post information about their courses and the project in which they are participating. Watch for their comments here.
October 26, 2007 at 1:00 pm
Karla Kitalong
As the Director of Writing Programs, the course I’ll be working with is ENC1102, and the plan for the Conference will be to examine how common readings having to do with the environment might best be integrated with course objectives and assessment mechanisms/criteria. The Council of Writing Program Administrators has published a set of outcomes for first-year composition; these will be consulted as well. In the spring, we will experiment with the ENC1102 curriculum by asking Spring semester teachers to voluntarily include a novel, Saints at the River by Ron rush, that demonstrates ethos, pathos, and logos by means of an environmental rhetoric. theme. The author will visit campus in February.
October 26, 2007 at 1:38 pm
Peter Jacques
Hello and Greetings.
The following is deeply related to my course objective for INR 4350 Global Environmental Politics, which is to use a two-pronged approach to climate change (CC). First I wish to raise in-class participation and specifically ask the questions regarding the implications of “common but differentiated” responsibilities (both in mitigation and adaptation). Second, I wish to transfer the critical ethical treatments of small in-class groups to political discussions regarding what the ethical conclusions/discussions mean to contributing to a larger community.
Let me explain….
This is probably a strange thing to hear, but I have never posted on a blog before. I guess I have been skeptical about the ability of blogs to influence public opinion, especially since much of my research has surrounded the discourses that have been fairly deceptive because they have been derived from within an elite countermovement (that I have measured and analyzed) but the countermovement hides itself as a collection of individual scientists who say there are no or few global environmental problems. They then publish this work unvetted, but it appears, such as through books, as having a public intellectual face. This has given me a very cynical view of think tanks (which publish whatever they want of course, but readers may think it is like any other academic pursuity, though academics typically publish what is vetted in peer reviewed papers). This has twisted our sense of what scientists working on climate change, for example, really think. In a recent 2006 poll, over half the American public believes that scientists are divided about the nature of climate change as an human-driven phenonmenon, even though these same people themselves believe CC is both real and needs to be addressed. Of coure, from much work on the issue, such as that from Naomi Oreskes, we know that the consensus is quite robust, and this consensus is easily observed when one goes to CC conferences and sees people from all over the world discussing how to improve methods, understand somehting more about the “mode and pace” of CC, impacts, vulnerabilities to human and non-human communities, the nature of feedback systems, etc… I have never even seen someone at one of these conferences say, “well this is all a big hoax” even though this is the kind of discourse we see in the popular culture.
None of this is to say that the public are witless dupes, but that the “context of interaction” regarding knowledge claims and their meaning for public action have been contorted under a ruse. The ruse in not what you may think though– to me, the ruse is hiding the organized countermovement that is behind it through what appear to most as serious intellecutual programs through conservative think tanks. This has disguised a political interest as an intellectual one and put the discourses on “what to do about CC” into seizures.
Thus, I have been reluctant to engage in blogs for much of the same reasons. I am not demurred by the democratic potential of blogs, but of the difficulty found in uncovering the political meaning and ideologies behind the various blogs.
I want student to be able to see beyond the “is it real” quesitons that can be treated with sophisticaiton regarding the philophophy and limits to science, but get to what I consider is something much more substantial. For example, we read research papers on the issue of “vulnerabilities”, such as those found in regions of India that rely directly on agriculture, and any change in monsoons can change the food availablity, at the same time that import sensitivities can challenge the income of these same families. Yet we might ask what is the climate legacy of these mostly peasant societies who are not burning hydrocarbons in the same way as those driving to work and plugging into a coal-power grid. Does relative impact drive relative duty? What communities to we have a duty to? What are the ways of framing these questions and what is the political impact of how these ethical discussions are framed?
In the faculty conference, I am going to think about how to develop these in-class participation projects in a productive and critical way.